The New Year's Quiz

 How was your Christmas then? Mine? Oh, fine, you know how it goes. Sadly everyone else in the house has been ill – they keep checking me every day for symptoms, but apart from an occasionally runny nose, I’ve not succumbed. It’s either teacher’s immunity, or the fact that since I had covid in 2021 it takes ages for me to completely shift a bad chest, and so maybe the antibodies from my cold a few weeks ago are still buzzing around.

So, yesterday I worked through a variety of sources I’ve been collecting for the New Year’s quiz in the rugby club, and put together the quiz. For the first quiz of the New Year we always have a quiz based on the events of the year just gone. I’ve been attending since the first quiz of 1996, which means 27 years by my calculations. I’ve written about the New Year quiz quite a bit in  the past, and I think that I should warn you now that I don’t really have anything new to say about it. After my first few years at the quiz I got extremely competitive about the New Year quiz in the club. Anne, one of my original teammates who sadly passed away a few years ago always used to work hard for the New Year quiz, learning stuff like who’d married whom, which celebrities had given their babies which names and so on. It speaks badly of me, but I didn’t want to be so badly outshone by one of my own teammates that I would learn for the quiz as well. Both Anne and I used to say that if we could only win one quiz every year, then we would want it to be the New Year quiz. Well, we never quite had so bad a year that it was the only one that we won, but for a few years we were pretty much unbeatable.

Nothing lasts forever. We started losing team members and the bloody phones started making an appearance. Around about 12 years ago it became ridiculous. Two of the teams would bring along other members who never usually played, and some of these were quite blatant in the way that they cheated with their phones. This became pretty obvious with the four part gambles. Its a tradition that the last question of each round should have four parts. A team could answer as many or as few parts as they liked. If they answered 1,2 or 3 parts, then they would get points for each correct answer, and lose nothing for a wrong one. If they tried all four, though, if they got all four right then they would get 8 points, but if they got any part wrong then they would get zero.

Thankfully that all seems to have died the death in the New Year quiz. Brian, our organiser and the best question master that the quiz has had, passed away a few years ago. Since then I’ve been QM for the New Year quiz, and I’ve enjoyed it too. Last year my team even won – they’ve got a lot to live up to now on Thursday, but I’ve every faith in them.

It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to put together, is a New Year’s quiz, so I hope that it will go okay. If not, well, it’ll be 12 months before anyone has to put up with another one.

I'd like to wish you all a Happy New Year, and thank you for your support during 2022.